Songs and Poems brings together five instrumental works written for Trio Accanto, the saxophone, piano and percussion trio, by Andreas Dohmen, Hans Thomalla, Walter Zimmermann, Wolfgang Rihm and Aldo Clementi. All are first recordings. Nobody sings and no poem is recited, yet each piece leans towards language, voice or song, and the title names that longing.
The trio was founded in 1994 by Marcus Weiss, Christian Dierstein and the pianist Yukiko Sugawara. Here it plays in the line-up of 2013 to 2025, with Nicolas Hodges at the piano. Its scoring is common in jazz but was a rarity in composed music, which earned it the description "a jazz trio that does not play jazz". Over the years close to a hundred composers have written for it. The disc is a production of Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln.
Dohmen's versi rapportati (2012/13) was commissioned by the trio and rests on Baroque verse structures that the listener does not need to know; Weiss moves between alto and baritone saxophone. Thomalla's Lied (2007/08), for tenor saxophone, piano and vibraphone, is a song without any singing. Zimmermann's As I was walking I came upon chance (1998/2008) takes its title from a poem by Robert Creeley, though the words are never heard; at over sixteen minutes it is one of the two longest pieces. Rihm's Gegenstück (2006) puts the contrabass saxophone at the centre, and Schott suggests that if it were a song it would be a manifesto against vocality. Clementi's Tre Ricercari (2000) closes the disc with nineteen minutes of instrumental counterpoint for alto saxophone, piano and celesta, vibraphone or tubular bells.
The programme is one of several Trio Accanto albums on Wergo, alongside Funambules, and other stories and a disc of music by Christian Wolff. Clementi and Rihm, like Zimmermann, belong to the composers the trio lists among the major contributors to its repertoire, next to Lachenmann, Sciarrino, Aperghis and Rebecca Saunders. The trio has also recorded for Kairos, HatHut and Edition Zeitklang, and has appeared at Donaueschingen, Witten, Darmstadt and Wien Modern.
CD, Wergo WER 7364 2, released in 2018, in the series Trio Accanto on Wergo, produced by Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln.
